Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (9 page)

      
How would those lips feel pressed to yours?
Where had that appalling thought come from? She removed her hand with a startled jerk and sat back, looking away from Cain's face, so young and guileless in repose. The bucket filled with soaking feverweed caught her attention. No help for it, Sees Much had shown her what she must do repeatedly through the night. Cain was burning up.

      
Roxanna squeezed the excess moisture from a fistful of the herb. She began to rub his hot dry skin with it, unconsciously comparing the lean hard muscles of his long body to the Confederate officers she had encountered during the war. The men who ranked high enough to merit her attention were older, with thickening midsections and flabby muscles. Using her feminine charms to wheedle information from lascivious men with hot sour breath and rough grasping hands had been an unpleasant task. Tending this beautiful man was not.

      
Roxanna finished rubbing his arms and chest, then moved on to his legs. When she reached the nexus of his body, she hesitated.

      
“What are you waiting for?” Cain's raspy voice whispered. He almost laughed at the horrified widening of her eyes when she jerked her hand away and looked in his face.

      
“You were unconscious, feverish. I was told—”

      
“I overheard what you were told. Do it,” he commanded, wondering if she possessed the nerve...wondering if he did.

      
“If you're awake and clear-headed enough to issue orders, you don't need me to bathe down your fever,” she said in a breathless, angry voice, throwing the clump of herbs back into the bucket with a loud plop.

      
“You're right, I don't. But I bet you're better at raising temperatures than lowering them. Aren't you?”

      
Roxanna paled. Those dark glowing eyes seemed to be peering into her very soul—as if he knew! She rose and dashed out of the lodge.

      
Cain stared into the flickering light of the fire, listening to the lonesome wail of a coyote, or perhaps a Pawnee scout. He wanted to be quit of this dangerous place and all its painful memories, quit of the troublesome silver-haired woman who was destined for Powell's heir. Was nothing ever to belong to him? Or he to any place or anyone?

      
With a snarled oath of pain, he turned his face from the fire and drifted into a troubled sleep.

* * * *

      
Over the following days as Cain mended, Sees Much insisted that Her Back Is Straight tend to him in spite of her protests. Gently but firmly, he brushed aside every excuse she made or reason why Willow Tree would be better suited. Finally, in exasperation, she worked up her courage and approached old Leather Shirt. The forbidding chief always made her feel uncomfortable, as if he had judged her and found her lacking.

      
“I do not want to care for the Lone Bull. Cannot one of the women of your people do it?” she asked, meeting his unnerving dark gaze head-on.

      
He studied her silently, as if measuring his reply. “He is no longer the Lone Bull. His name is Not Cheyenne. He is white. You are white,” he said as if it were an accusation. “And he has paid many rifles to have you.”

      
“He does not have me,” she blurted out, then reddened in mortification. “I don't belong to anyone.”

      
“Your thoughts betray you,” the old man said. “Return to Not Cheyenne's fire.” He raised his arm and pointed, a gesture that allowed no argument. As Leather Shirt watched the young woman trudge back to the lodge, he pondered her declaration.
I don't belong to anyone
. “Sees Much, my brother, you are right.” The old chief's smile was almost sympathetic.

      
Your thoughts betray you
. That evening as she made her way back to the lodge where Cain was waiting for supper, Leather Shirt's words rang in her ears.

      
Willow Tree and Lark Song had roasted a large piece of buffalo hump, along with chunks of dried lung. The latter delicacy she abstained from trying. Dishing up the meat, along with a honey-sweetened bowl of chokecherries, she carried the food inside.

      
Cain was sitting up, leaning against a pair of the heavy parfleches, using them as a backrest. He looked up at her, noting the rosy flush of her cheeks. She had been tense as a treed cat around him ever since that night he awakened while she was bathing him. What had set her off now? He said nothing, just watched as she knelt, placing the food before him. She was graceful as a society belle in spite of being dressed in doeskin clothing and sitting on the bare dirt floor of a smoke-filled lodge. When she arranged the meat on the board with a knife, she started to rise and leave.

      
Suddenly he wanted her to stay. “Don't go—join me. You must be hungry.”

      
Roxanna was startled. The invitation seemed impulsive and earnest, two qualities she never suspected Cain possessed. One silvery eyebrow lifted. “Surely a mere woman cannot eat with a warrior.”

      
“I'm Not Cheyenne, remember? I can do whatever I choose, and I choose to share my food with you...if you would consent to join me.”

      
Something made her sit back down, perhaps the watery weakening in her knees. She reached for some of the chokecherries as he carved the charred dry slab of bison meat into palatable slices, offering her one.

      
‘‘It's not beef, but it's not bad,” he said as he helped himself to a piece, ignoring the desiccated lung.

      
“You're right, you aren't Indian, are you? I mean...you don't seem to like being here even though you were born here,” she said, curiosity winning out over wariness at last. Many things that Sees Much and Leather Shirt had said over the past days since Cain's arrival intrigued her. The Lone Bull intrigued her, she admitted grudgingly.

      
A guarded look came over his face as he asked, “What have you been told about me?”

      
She shrugged. “Not much. That you were named Lone Bull by your mother, Blue Corn Woman. That your father was a white trader they call His Eyes Are Cold...and you chose to leave. Now they call you Not Cheyenne.” A sudden thought occurred to her. “Jubal—my grandfather—he isn't your father?” Surely there was no resemblance to the old daguerreotype on Alexa's mantel.

      
Cain breathed easier, a difficult feat with his ribs still bound. Then a bitter half-smile touched his lips. “No, Jubal's my employer, no kin.”

      
That confirmation brought a bizarre rush of relief to Roxanna that she chose not to examine. “Why did you leave these people?”

      
“I didn't leave. I was banished,” he replied flatly.

      
“Why?” Her dream of the young buffalo with the bloodied horns returned. Sees Much had understood its significance but had refused to share it with her. Suddenly she felt a sense of foreboding as she studied the injured man's harsh expression and moody black eyes.

      
Cain had never told any white person his story, but suddenly he felt the need to share it with Alexa Hunt, spoiled, arrogant eastern heiress. The look of genuine concern—and confusion—in her eyes made his breath catch. This attraction was madness. Best to end it by telling her the truth...or at least part of the truth.

      
“I killed my brother.” A cold feral smile spread across his lips, then vanished, leaving his face desolate. “Cain. I chose the name to remind me of the blood on my hands.”

      
There was a well of self-loathing in those words. Horrified as she felt at the admission, Roxanna sensed his pain. “You would not have done it without a good reason,” she said softly.

      
“I thought it was a good one then...when I was young, in pain, alone... I was my mother's second son,” he began and the years rolled back. “Her Cheyenne husband was killed by whites when my brother, High-Backed Wolf, was three years old. Then my father came to one of the meets. He was a trapper and trader. He married Blue Corn Woman according to her people's ways and I was born. Maybe it would have been different if he'd gone Indian, the way many of the mountain men did, and lived with us. But he went away often and I was left for High-Backed Wolf and his friends to torment whenever my mother wasn't looking. Sees Much was good to me, but it wasn't the same as having a father to teach me to become a warrior. I lived for the times my father would return, but as I grew older those times were further and further apart. You see, he had a city wife, a white woman and another son, a white heir who counted. I was nothing to him.”

      
The bitterness in those words made her wince in empathy. For all her loneliness since the war, Roxanna had spent a happy childhood surrounded by parents and a brother who doted upon her. She waited and he resumed his story, staring into the fire as the twilight thickened.

      
“Finally when I was ten years old my father returned. He had been gone for years. Some vestige of conscience, maybe, but I think it was because he couldn't let the savages have something that belonged to him...even if he didn't want it himself. He took me to be educated at a mission over on Big Sandy Creek in Colorado Territory. It was run by a man named Enoch Sterling...the kindest, gentlest soul who ever lived. He'd been a Methodist missionary in Canton, China, for many years. Then something drew him to minister to the Indians. The Cheyenne called him Good Heart, a fitting name.”

      
“And you found a father to replace the one who deserted you.”

      
Her flash of intuition took Cain by surprise. He nodded. “He never converted me, but he did give me the benefit of his considerable classical education. I can read Latin, even speak Cantonese, the former not very practical out West but the latter quite useful. I stayed with Enoch at his mission for nine years. All the while I kept writing to my father and Enoch saw to it that he answered back now and then, but he never returned to visit me.”

      
“What brought you back to the Cheyenne, then?”

      
“My mother fell ill the winter I turned twenty. As she lay dying, she sent word that she wanted to see me...I hadn't been much better about visiting her than my father was about me. I came to Leather Shirt's camp while my brother and his friends were off raiding.

      
“There had been trouble building between the whites and the Cheyenne during the late fifties. Increasing numbers of whites started pouring across the immigrant trail, settlers bound for Oregon, miners for Montana and California. A detachment of soldiers from Fort Lyon rode down on a camp of Cheyenne where some of our kinsmen lived and massacred them. High-Backed Wolf whipped up a bunch of hotheads in the Dog Soldier Society to take revenge. Weasel Bear was one of them.

      
“My mother died the day after I arrived. I felt good that I had come back to see her one last time...until I returned to the mission and found the smoldering ruins. Enoch…” He struggled to say the words, the images still choking him with horror even after nearly eight years.

      
“Enoch wasn't dead. They'd tortured him and left him for me to find... My brother's war lance was driven up inside his belly. With his dying breath he pleaded for me not to kill High-Backed Wolf.” His voice broke, but he was so lost in the telling now that he did not realize how it affected the white woman. “I swore revenge on his grave.

      
“High-Backed Wolf knew I'd come after him, but he made me work to find him, rampaging across the plains, burning and killing from the Bozeman Trail down to the Staked Plains in Texas. I caught up with him—or he let me finally find him, I was never sure which—when he had returned to visit Leather Shirt's band.

      
“Sees Much tried to reason with me. Leather Shirt threatened to kill me, but they both knew neither of us would rest until one was dead.” At length he looked up from the fire and met her eyes. “After I'd killed him, the tribal elders decreed banishment, which didn't matter much to me by then. There was nothing left for me here.”

      
Roxanna had never heard another human being sound so utterly alone as Cain. What could she say to assuage such pain? The silence stretched on for moments, but oddly neither seemed to mind, for there was a strange new sense of communion between them. Some impulse made her reach across to him and place her hand over his.

      
Cain looked down at her small pale fingers as they lightly brushed the back of his large bronzed fist. Then he raised his eyes to hers.

Chapter Five

      
Roxanna returned his gaze and her breath caught at the look of naked longing in his obsidian eyes. He opened his palm and encircled her wrist with long tapered fingers, pulling her toward him. Hypnotized, she came willingly into his arms as he guided her hand, placing it against the hard wall of his chest. She could feel his heart thudding swiftly and knew her own must echo its wild cadence.

      
His eyes never left hers, reading assent in their turquoise depths. Slowly, ever so slowly, he lowered his mouth to hers, waiting, testing to see if she would pull away at the last moment. He almost wished she would. This was madness. She was MacKenzie's granddaughter. The old man would have his head on a platter, not to mention his cock and balls! But she didn't pull away. Instead she leaned toward him ever so slightly with a little catch in her breathing. Her lips parted...warm...soft...irresistible.

      
He was going to kiss her and she was inviting him to do it! During her years as a spy and actress, many men had made advances. Their pawing and slobbering had been loathsome. But this...this...would be different.